By Aida Chavez | 2 July 2020
THE INTERCEPT — California Democrat Sen. Kamala Harris is widely seen as a frontrunner for a spot on the ticket with presumptive nominee Joe Biden, with vetting well underway.
Presidential vetting operations have entire teams of investigators, but for the public, when the pick is announced, the most common source for information about the person chosen is Wikipedia. And there, a war has broken out over how to talk about Harris’s career.
At least one highly dedicated Wikipedia user has been scrubbing controversial aspects of Harris’s “tough-on-crime” record from her Wikipedia page, her decision not to prosecute Steve Mnuchin for mortgage fraud-related crimes, her strong support of prosecutors in Orange County who engaged in rampant misconduct, and other tidbits — such as her previous assertion that “it is not progressive to be soft on crime” — that could prove unflattering to Harris as the public first gets to know her on the national stage. The edits, according to the page history, have elicited strong pushback from Wikipedia’s volunteer editor brigade, and have drawn the page into controversy, though it’s a fight the pro-Harris editor is currently winning. […]
https://people.com/music/kanye-west-says-i-am-running-for-president-of-united-states/?did=539697-20200705&utm_campaign=people-news_newsletter&utm_source=people.com&utm_medium=email&utm_content=070520&cid=539697&mid=36569424568
link — I think 2020 has damaged the part of my brain that allows me to be surprised by things anymore.
Wikipedia has been an intelligence agency project from the get-go
Its supremo, Jimmy Jimbo Wales, was recruited out of his previous internet business of selling pornography. As is noted, he established the ultimate machine on which paedophiles and criminals have been able to publish fake biographies of themselves, enabling the commission of further crimes
Wales goes to intimate birthday parties of Presidents of Israel, and has received a million-dollar prize from Tel Aviv University for his contributions to Zionism
Thousands of Wikipedia edits have been traced back to known CIA and intelligence agency addresses
US Presidents have told campaign donors that one of their benefits will be editing their own Wikipedia pages to suit themselves
“Every dumbf-ck in the world believes Wikipedia … and most people are f-cking dumbf-cks.”
EU police and prosecutor report on crimes of Wikipedia with Google, Wikimedia fundraising fraud, and the ’20 Major Techniques of Wikipedia Deception’
http://pastebin.com/BeppgiMJ
Editing/working at The Intercept is nice work if you can get it:
Betsy Reed is the most highly compensated employee at The Intercept. In 2018 she received over $425,000 in compensation for her work as editor in chief — there is a link to the organization’s 2018 financial info in her Wikipedia entry.
Jeremy Scahill is also there (I know him from Democracy Now): Jeremy attended a few University of Wisconsin regional campuses and a local technical college before deciding that his “time would be better spent by entering the struggle for justice in this country.” After dropping out of college, Scahill spent several years on the East Coast working in homeless shelters.
Per the same 2018 financial disclosure, Scahill was paid $285k by The Intercept, plus $130k from “related organizations” — for 32 hrs/week.